Addressing Human Sexuality

Trey Jones • March 9, 2023

ADDRESSING HUMAN SEXUALITY 

I am filled with profound fear and trembling before you. My fear is rooted in the lack of our lack of conversation in trusting, loving, Christlike relationships; yet, that is crucial in addressing controversial and difficult social issues! I want to talk with you and listen to you in a face-to-face conversation built on the fierce love and holiness of Jesus Christ, not just lovey-dovey sentimentality or angry legalism. I want us to hold tightly to one another as we offer the whole Gospel by the whole Church to the whole world. In spite of or in light of all the brokenness in our United Methodist Church, Crossgates United Methodist, and our own lives, let’s talk about sex…

 

IDOLATRY OF SEXUALIZED IDENTITY

In the beginning, God created something good and created someone(s) who were very good. These humans, both male and female together, bore a unique and special gift: the image of God. Rather than live in daily celebration of eternal life with God, the humans listened to a hissing voice of lies and chaos rather than the loving Creator for their source of identity and purpose. This hissing voice continues to call out to humans: “Make your identity and purpose the unlimited pursuit and love of money, sex, and power…true human life is found with these!” The consequence of this alternate, sin-stained identity was a form of existence devoid of abundant life and a tragic distortion of the image of God. Humans continue to refuse the healthy stewardship of money, sex, and power in God’s way, and setup that unholy trinity as idols.


However, that tragic loss of innocence, identity, and purpose was not nor is not enough to tear humans away from the love of God. The cosmic arc of God’s gracious salvation immediately began after the fall to unfold and work its way out in reconditioning the human heart to love God with all that we are and love others as an extension of self. Eventually, the loving Creator would keep a promise to replace hearts of stone with hearts of flesh that beat for God. Jesus the Christ and Son of God provided salvation to all creation and became the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Jesus inaugurates the new creation of God in which we humans rediscover and renew the intent of creation: Daily celebration of eternal life with God.

Sisters and brothers in Christ, I am deeply concerned that we have strayed from the Scripture way of salvation, specifically in the context of our western sexualized identity. While the call of the world is to identify through money, sex, and power, the call of God in Christ is: Because I AM, you are my child. We are expected to and empowered to love God with all that we are and love others as extensions of our love of God. However, we have allowed the world to define love differently than God in Christ (which is the true definition of love) to be sexual pleasure, sexual pursuit, sexual consumption, and sexual identity. The world commoditizes our sexualized identities and expressions by squeezing out of us all that it can until we are empty shells of human brokenness. I lament that in our western churches, in my church, and in the United Methodist Church, we have embraced this sexualized identity in all of its forms and expressions, rather than confront the idolatrous belief that we were created for pleasure and appetite, rather than daily celebration of eternal life with God.


Scripture bears witness to an unfolding, unified story of God’s mighty acts of salvation and reconciliation that is filled full and completed by Jesus Christ, the faithful human that God intended us to be at creation. He is the pioneer and perfector of our faith; so, how by looking to him can we repent of this idolatry of sexualized identity and conform to the true humanity that God created us to be? I invite us into an examination of three provocative texts that speak of the surrender of sexualized identity in the form of eunuchs in the kingdom of God.  


In the sexualized identity of patriarchal Judaism and Roman culture of the first century, which viewed women as sexually consumable objects and men as entitled to sexual power, Jesus says the following to his confused disciples: “For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb, there are eunuchs who were made that way by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves that way because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who is able to accept it should accept it” (Matthew 19:12). Jesus says that there is much more to being human than having bodies used for sexual pleasure and reproduction. He rejected sexualized identity for the sake of daily celebration of eternal life with God.


As the news of the resurrection of Jesus continued to unfold in the world, one of the first converts to Jesus was a eunuch, someone that the world treated with a side-eye because of their damaged sexual potential. “As they were traveling down the road, they came to some water. The eunuch said, ‘Look, there’s water. What would keep me from being baptized?’ So he ordered the chariot to stop, and both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water, and he baptized him” (Acts 8:36-38 CSB). The early Church was willing to initiate a eunuch fully into its community fellowship and into daily celebration of eternal life with God against the cultural insistence of a sexualized identity.


Finally, the prophet Isaiah, looking towards a day in which God would fulfill all human potential as it was at creation, proclaimed this amazing news: “For the Lord says this: ‘For the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, and choose what pleases me, and hold firmly to my covenant, I will give them, in my house and within my walls, a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters. I will give each of them an everlasting name that will never be cut off’” (Isaiah 56:4-5 CSB). The kingdom of God is not about what sex produces; rather, those who are faithful without a sexualized identity receive an everlasting identity of daily celebration of eternal life with God.


Brothers and sisters, let us all reject the idolatry of sexualized identity and turn back to Jesus as our ultimate identity lest we be handed over and consumed by money, sex, and power and the inevitable wrath to come is upon us. Come back to your true human identity as a beloved child of God made in God’s image with a body designed for daily celebration of eternal life with God. “We know that we are of God, and the whole world is under the sway of the evil one. And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know the true one. We are in the true one—that is, in his Son, Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Little children, guard yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:19-21).

Spiritual and Theological Traditions That Shaped Methodism

By Trey Jones • January 5, 2023
SHORT THOUGHTS ON THE SPIRITUAL CONTEXT OF WESLEY’S ENGLAND I was fascinated to see the impact that the patristic and matristic authors of the early church had on Wesley. The Baptist tradition in which I was raised, and the Methodist tradition in which I live, have a proclivity to jump from the close of the Apostolic Age to the start of the Reformation, as if 1500 years of church life never occurred. Moreover, while we acknowledge the impact of Roman Catholic teachings and practices, we ignore the contributions of Eastern Orthodox traditions. To learn that the writings of Macarius of Egypt and Ephraem Syrus nudged Wesley towards an understanding that sanctification is a process rather than a destination blew my mind. This is profound since, as Brian Germano asserts, “…this view became a defining characteristic of Wesleyan/Methodist Christianity.” [1] SHORT THOUGHTS ON THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF WESLEY’S ENGLAND I must confess in advance that my wife is a university history professor whom I have heard lecture about the radical cultural, familial, social, legal, and healthcare upheaval created by the Industrial Revolution. What I find fascinating is that the Industrial Revolution catalyzed radical upheaval in doctrine. Now that I have typed that, it seems obvious; but, I wonder if they, Christians living between 1760 and 1830, recognized in the moment how fast change was happening and how little control they actually had. Germano speaks into this, “Thus we find an eighteenth-century England that is at once both publicly smug and secure concerning their current situation, yet privately apprehensive and anxious about the future.” [2] Can we and do we see ourselves in the same dilemma today? While the Industrial Revolution brought many modern conveniences and economic growth through capitalism, it also ushered in a new world of hurt, pain, sickness, loneliness, and environmental harm. Nonetheless, Wesley did not wring his hands and pen editorial jeremiads; rather, he gathered the people of God and showed them the transformational grace of God within acts of social holiness. I am left wondering: Would Wesley have been Wesley the Methodist Reformer and Evangelist without the Industrial Revolution? SHORT THOUGHTS ON ENGLISH AND CONTINENTAL REFORMATION Well, I never thought a geography lesson would be instrumental in understanding the impact of the English and Continental Reformation on Wesley, but, historian Richard Heitzenrater declares, “We must remember also that the British themselves, if nothing else, have always been shaped in part by their geography: They are an insular people—they live on islands, such that no matter where they are, no one is father than 75 miles from the sea.” [3] By the very nature of their geography, the English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh people groups developed insular identities, xenophobic sentiments, notions of linguistic superiority, and nationalistic ambitions. This geography, especially as it frustrated foreign invasion and continental papal meddling, facilitated the eventual schism and establishment of the Church of England by King Henry VIII. After a century of bloodshed and division, a deeply felt anti-Roman Catholic sentiment became indelible and was used by reformers and dissidents to justify their actions, doctrines, and polities. While not to trivialize the important doctrinal and practical considerations of Wesley and the Methodists, the location of the British Isles on the Eurasian tectonic plate may have literally and metaphorically carried them to their distinctive doctrinal destination. [1] Brian E. Germano, Christianity the Wesleyan Way: Principles and Practices for Life and Ministry (Nashville: Wesley’s Foundery Books, 2020), 18. [2] Ibid, 276. [3] Referenced within The Wesleyan Studies Project, Series I: Methodist History , “English and Continental Reformation,” lecture by Richard Heitzenrater (Washington, DC: Wesley Ministry Network, 2010), DVD Lesson 1.